Impact of link failures on VoIP performance

Transcription

1 1 Impact of link failures on VoIP performance Catherine Boutremans, Gianluca Iannaccone and Christophe Diot Abstract We use active and passive traffic measurements to identify the issues involved in the deployment of a voice service over a tier-1 IP backbone network. Our findings indicate that no specific handling of voice packets is needed in the current backbone (i.e. QoS differentiation) but new protocols and mechanisms need to be introduced to provide a better protection against link failures. We discover that link failures may be followed by long periods of routing instability, during which packets can be dropped because forwarded along invalid paths. We also identify the need for a new family of quality of service mechanisms based on protection of traffic and availability of the service rather than performance in terms of delay and loss. I. INTRODUCTION Recently, tier-1 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have shown an ever increasing interest in providing voice and telephone services over their current Internet infrastructures. Voice-over-IP (VoIP) appears to be a very cost effective solution to provide alternative services to the traditional telephone networks. However, ISPs need to provide a comparable quality both in terms of voice quality and availability of the service. We can identify three major causes of potential degradation of performance for telephone services over the Internet: network congestion, link failures and routing instabilities. Our goal is to study the frequency of these events and to assess their impact on VoIP performance. We use passive monitoring of backbone links to evaluate the occurrence and impact of network congestion on data traffic. Passive measurements carried over different locations in the U.S. Sprint IP backbone allow us to study the transmission delay of voice packets and to evaluate the degree of congestion. However, this kind of measurement cannot provide any information related to link failures or routing instabilities. For this purpose, we have also deployed an active measurement infrastructure in two locations well connected to the backbone. We capture and timestamp the probe packets at both ends to quantify losses and observe the impact of route changes on the voice traffic. We performed many week-long experiments in order to observe many link fail- C. Boutremans is with École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. G. Iannaccone and C. Diot are with Sprint ATL, Burlingame, CA. ure scenarios. Given that all our measurements take place in the same Autonomous System (AS) we also complement our data with IS-IS routing information [7] collected in one of the backbone Points of Presence (POPs). This additional information give us a fairly complete view of the events that occur during our experiments. Indeed, active probes and routing information give us the capability of identifying precisely the links, the routers and even the interfaces that are responsible for failures or instabilities in the network. Our findings indicate that the Sprint IP backbone network is ready to provide a toll-quality voice service. The level of congestion in the backbone is always negligible and has no impact on the voice quality. On the other hand, link failures can heavily compromise the quality of VoIP. We discover that link failures may be followed by long periods of routing instability, during which packets can be dropped because forwarded along invalid paths. Such instabilities can last for tens of minutes resulting in the loss of reachability of a large set of end-hosts. The paper is structured as follows. Section II briefly presents some related work, while Section III provides detailed information on the measurement approaches followed in this study. Section IV describes the model used to assess the subjective quality of voice calls from transport level measurable quantities. Section V presents our findings and some concluding remarks find their place in Section VI. II. RELATED WORK Past literature on end-to-end Internet measurements has often focused on the study of network loss patterns and delay characteristics [6], [5], [21], [20], [13]. In an early work, Kostas [15] considered the feasibility of real-time voice over the Internet and discussed measured delay and loss characteristics. In order to evaluate the quality of Internet Telephony, [11] provided network performance data (in terms of delay and losses) collected from a wide range of geographically distributed sites. All these studies were based on round-trip delay measurements. While information about delay and losses can give valuable insights about the quality of VoIP, they do not characterize the actual subjective quality experienced by VoIP users. In [9], Cole et al. propose a method for monitoring

2 2 end of each experiment we verified that no packet losses were induced on the last hops of the paths. We also use an IS-IS listener [18] to record all routing messages during the experiment. The listener is installed in one of the backbone PoPs transited by our probe traffic. We use the IS-IS messages to correlate loss and delay events to changes in the routing information. Fig. 1. Architecture of the active measurement systems. the quality of VoIP applications based upon a reduction of the E-model [2] to measurable transport level quantities (such as delay and losses). Parallel to this work, Markopolou et al. [16] use subjective quality measures (also based on the E-model) to assess the ability of Internet backbones to support voice communications. This work uses a collection of GPS synchronized packet traces. Their results indicate that some backbones are able to provide toll quality VoIP today. In addition, they report that even good paths exhibit occasional long loss periods that could be attributed to routing changes. However, they do not investigate the impact of link failures on voice traffic. III. MEASUREMENTS In this section we describe the two measurement approaches used in our study: i) the active measurement system that uses probe packets to study routing protocols stability and link failures; and ii) the passive measurement system deployed over more than 30 links in the Sprint IP backbone network that makes accurate delay measurements possible. A. Active measurements We deployed active measurement systems in two locations of the U.S. (West and East Coast) connected to the Sprint backbone. The systems make use of DAG3.2e cards [8] to capture and timestamp (using GPS and CDMA receivers) the probe packets. The DAG cards provide a very accurate timestamping of packets synchronized with a precision in the order of ten microseconds [17]. The probes are recorded and timestamped right before the access links of the two locations in both directions. Figure 1 shows the architecture of the testbed and its connection to the Sprint backbone. Note that each access router in a POP is connected to two backbone routers for reliability and per-destination prefix load balancing is usually implemented. The access links to the backbone were chosen to be unloaded in order not to introduce additional delay. At the B. Passive measurements We complement active measurements with passive measurements carried over three POPs in the same backbone network. Details on the passive monitoring infrastructure can be found in [10]. In this study, we use data from various OC-12 intra-pop link traces collected on September 5th, 2001 and November 8th, A packet trace contains the first 44 bytes of every IP packet that traverses the monitored link. Every packet record is also timestamped using a GPS clock signal which provides accurate and fine-grained timing information. We use passive measurements to compute one-way delay of packets between each couple of POPs. This way we have accurate backbone router to backbone router delay measurements over a very large set of packets. In order to compute one-way delays we used the technique described in [19]. IV. VOICE CALL RATING Even though active measurements may provide accurate information on network delay and losses, such statistics are not always appropriate to infer the quality of voice calls. In addition to measurements, we use a methodology to emulate voice calls from our packet traces and assess their quality using the E-model standard [2], [3], [4]. The E-model predicts the subjective quality that will be experienced by an average listener combining the impairment caused by transmission parameters (such as loss and delay) into a single rating. The rating can then be used to predict subjective user reactions, such as the Mean Opinion Score (MOS). According to ITU-T Recommendation G.107, a rating below 60 indicates unacceptable quality, while values above 70 correspond to PSTN quality (values above 90 corresponding to very good quality). The E-model rating Ê is given by: Ê Ê ¼ Á Á Á (1) where Ê ¼ groups the effects of noise, Á represents impairments that occur simultaneously with the voice signal, Á is the impairment associated with the mouth-to-ear delay, and Á is the impairment associated with signal distortion (caused by low bit rate codecs and packet losses).

3 3 The advantage factor is the deterioration that callers are willing to tolerate because of the access advantage that certain systems have over traditional wirebound telephony, i.e. the advantage factor for mobile telephony is 10. Although an analytical expression for Á is given in [3] and values for Á are provided in Appendix A of [4] for different loss conditions, those standards do not give a fully analytical expression for the R-factor. In this work, we use the simplified analytic expression for the R-factor proposed in [9] that describes the R-factor as a function of observable transport level quantities 1 : Ê ¾ ¼ ½½ ½ µà ½ µ ¼ ¼¾ ¼ ÐÒ ½ ½ µ (2) where À is the Heavyside function, is the total loss probability (i.e., it encompasses the losses in the network and the losses due to the arrival of a packet after its playout time), and is the mouth-to-ear delay. is composed of the encoding delay (algorithmic and packetization delay), the network delay (transmission, propagation and queuing delay) and the playout delay introduced by the playout buffer in order to cope with delay variations. A. Call generation In order to assess the quality of voice calls placed at random times during the measurement period, we emulate the arrival of short business calls. We pick call arrival times according to a Poisson process with a mean interarrival time of 60 seconds. We draw the call durations according to an exponential distribution with a mean of 3.5 min [14]. The randomly generated calls are then applied to the packet traces for quality assessment. Since IP telephony applications often use silence suppression to reduce their sending rate, we simulate talkspurt and silence periods within each voice call using for both periods an exponential distribution with an average of 1.5sec [12]. Packets belonging to a silence period are simply ignored. At the receiver end, we assume that a simple playout buffer strategy is implemented with a fixed playout delay of 75ms. In order to asses the quality of a call we apply equation (2) to each talkspurt and then we define the rating of a call as the average of the ratings of all the talkspurts. V. RESULTS In this section we discuss our findings derived from our experiments and measurements. Figure 2 shows the one- ½ Note that the coefficients in expression (2) correspond to the use of the G.711 codec with packet loss concealment, without echo and in presence of random losses. Frequency (%) Delay (msec) Fig. 2. Distribution of the transmission delay between East and West Coast of the U.S. way delay between two major cities on the East and West Coast of the United States. The data shown refers to a trace collected on September 5th 2001, however similar results can be found in all the traces studied. The delay backbone-to-backbone is around ms with a delay variation of few hundreds of microseconds. Low delays are a direct result of the over-provisioning design strategies followed by most tier-1 ISPs in the attempt to keep the maximum link utilization for backbone links below the threshold of 50%. Such strategy is dictated by the need for commercial ISPs to be highly resilient to network failures that can potentially involve multiple links or routers and, thus, cause abrupt surges of traffic over large portions of the network. These figures of delay show that a voice service over the current Sprint IP backbone is feasible, however this kind of passive measurement does not provide any indication on the quality of the voice calls, since packet losses are not taken into account. For this purpose, we carried a large number of measurements with active probes over several weeks using the testbed described in Section III. In the experiment we discuss here, probes are sent from Reston (VA) to San Francisco (CA) for a duration of 2.5 days starting at UTC on November 27th, We have chosen this trace because it provides good insights on link failures and re-routing events. Four systems are sending 200 byte UDP probes at a rate of 50 probes per seconds. We choose this rate so that the probes could be easily used to emulate a voice call compliant to the G.711 standard [1]. Figure 3 shows the distribution of the one-way delays of the active probes. The minimum delay is 30.95ms, the average is 31.38ms while the 99.9% of the probes experi-

4 Empirical density function Delay (ms) Delay (ms) :30 06:40 06:50 07:00 07:10 07:20 07:30 07:40 Time (UTC) Fig. 3. Empirical density function of the one-way delay of probe packets from Reston (VA) to San Francisco (CA). ence a delay below 32.85ms. The first observation we can make is that Figure 3 confirms the results of the passive measurements. The delay distribution shows also that an event of rerouting has occurred during the experiment. The difference in the delay between the two routes is around 500 s that corresponds to approximately 100 kilometers of optical fiber. This is also a typical characteristic of the design of backbone networks: in order to minimize the impact of potential link failures, multiple IP routes following disjoint fiber paths connect each couple of POPs. In order to investigate further the re-routing event, we plot in Figure 4 the delay that our voice probes experience at the time of the link failure. Each dot in the plot represents the average delay over a five-second interval. Figure 5 provides also the average packet loss rate over the five-second intervals. At time one of the links carrying the probe traffic fails. After about 100ms, all packets are re-routed along an alternative path (with a longer propagation delay), resulting in the loss of just 6 probe packets. Although the quality of a voice call would certainly be affected by the loss of 100ms worth of traffic, the total impact of the link failure on the voice traffic is minimal, given the short time needed for the recovery and the small jitter induced by the re-routing. Although the first recovery is completed successfully, when the failed link starts flapping (i.e. oscillates between the operational and failed states), it appears that the fail-over mechanism that should cause the traffic to be rerouted each time the link goes down does not work properly anymore. During that interval (from to 06.48) we observe long loss events followed by very low delays periods with no loss. This is a clear indication that packet Fig. 4. Average delay during link failure. Each dot corresponds to a five-second interval Packet loss rate (%) :30 06:40 06:50 07:00 07:10 07:20 07:30 07:40 Time (UTC) Fig. 5. Average packet loss rate during the link failure. Each dot corresponds to a five-second interval drops are not due to congestion events. At time the link stops flapping but it takes about 12 minutes for an alternative path to be activated. Subsequently, some oscillations in the routing are still present that cause more packet drops. Finally, at time the original path is operational again 2. Then, at time an alternative path (different from the previous backup path) is chosen and used for the remaining part of our experiment. We have investigated further this failure studying the routing data we collected during the experiment. At the time of failure, a set of routers reported loss of adjacency with one of the router that was on the forwarding path of our traffic. This confirms our hypothesis of a router fail- ¾ The fact that the link goes down and then after few minutes is operational again may imply that this failure is due to a router problem (e.g. operating system crash).

5 5 Call Rating :00 12:00 18:00 00:00 06:00 12:00 18:00 00:00 06:00 12:00 Time (UTC) Fig. 6. Voice call ratings (excluding the time of failure) ure. However, we have not yet been able to identify the cause of the long period of instability that is not consistent with IS-IS specifications. In order to evaluate the quality of the voice calls we emulated a set of voice calls using the delay and loss statistics of the probes as described in Section IV. Figure 6 shows the rating of the voice calls during the 2.5 days of the experiment. Note that we did not place any call during the time of failure (50 minutes in total) so the quality of calls shown in the graph is not influenced by the link failure. The average call rating is assuming a fixed playout buffer. Only one call (out of about 3,600) experience a quality rating below 70, the lower threshold for toll-quality. We are currently in the process of investigating what caused the low quality of some calls. The very good quality of voice traffic is a direct consequence of the low delays, jitter and loss rates that probes experience. Without taking into account the 50 minutes of failure, the average loss rate is 0.19%. Even if we count in the failure, the loss rate over the 2.5 days is equal to 1.15%. VI. CONCLUSION We have presented the results of a set of active and passive measurements carried over the Sprint IP backbone network. We have run experiments for several weeks and we can derive the following conclusions: A voice service based on VoIP is certainly feasible over the Sprint IP backbone network. Delay and loss figures indicate that the quality of the voice calls would be comparable with that of traditional telephone networks. However, voice quality is not the only metric of interest for evaluating the feasibility of a VoIP service. Indeed, availability of the service also covers a fundamental role and it may be a major issue for ISPs, in particular when traffic crosses multiple autonomous systems. The major causes of quality degradation are currently link and router failures. We have observed that despite careful IP route protection, link failures and unexplained routing instabilities can significantly impact an IP voice service. Moreover, given the high operational costs involved in maintaining alternative backup paths for all the traffic, we foresee the need for a new family of quality of service mechanisms based on protection. In this case, customers could decide to protect against routing failures only portions of their traffic. Future work will involve more experiments. We will address the problem of VoIP traffic traversing multiple autonomous systems and we will study the causes of routing instabilities. Moreover, we will try to refine our model for voice call ratings implementing more efficient playout buffer strategies to evaluate their importance and impact on the quality of VoIP. REFERENCES [1] Pulse code modulation (PCM) of voice frequencies. ITU-T Recommendation G.711, November [2] Speech processing, transmission and quality aspects (STQ); overall transmission plan aspects for telephony in private networks. ETSI Guide , February [3] The e-model, a computational model for use in transmission plannning. ITU-T Recommendation G.107, May [4] Provisional planning values for equipment impairment factor Á. Appendix to ITU-T Recommendation G.113, February [5] J.-C. Bolot. End-to-end packet delay and loss behavior in the internet. In Proc. ACM Sigcomm 93, pages , August San Francisco, CA. [6] M. Borella. Measurement and interpretation of internet packet loss. Journal of Communication and Networks, 2(2):93 102, June [7] R. Callon. Use of OSI IS-IS for routing in TCP/IP and dual environments. RFC 1195, Dec [8] J. Cleary, S. Donnelly, I. Graham, A. McGregor, and M. Pearson. Design principles for accurate passive measurements. In Proceedings of Passive and Active Measurement Workshop, Apr [9] R. Cole and J. Rosenbluth. Voice over ip performance monitoring. ACM Computer Communication Review, 31(2), Apr [10] C. Fraleigh, C. Diot, B. Lyles, S. Moon, P. Owezarski, D. Papagiannaki, and F. Tobagi. Design and deployment of a passive monitoring infrastructure. In Proceedings of Passive and Active Measurement Workshop, Apr [11] O. Hagsand, K. Hanson, and I. Marsh. Measuring Internet Telephony quality: where are we today? In Proc. Globecom 99, pages , Dec [12] W. Jiang and H. Schulzrinne. Qos measurement of internet real-time multimedia services. Technical Report CUCS , Columbia University, December [13] W. Jiang and H. Schulzrinne. Modeling of packet loss and delay and their effect on real-time multimedia service quality. In Proceedings of ACM NOSSDAV, June 2000.

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